My Real Life Blog--because the blog-o-sphere is real life!

Monday, August 8, 2011

It's the Little Things

I didn't have as much time to play with photos as I'd hoped today, but I really miss it when I cannot participate in at least one of the Tuesday Challenges. Since what I was spending my free time on was looking at past photos and trying to eliminate some of them, I came across this personal favorite of mine of Sunflower at 4 1/2 months. I thought it would be perfect for Texture Tuesday's "It's the Little Things" edition, since she isn't so little anymore.

Original

Of course it needed a little editing in order to fit the rules of Texture Tuesday~use one of Kim Klassen's fabulous textures.

It is kind of funny what I ended up doing here. First I ran a softening action~twice, but only on the background. I masked Sunflower off. Then I used the CoffeeShop's Perfect Portrait 3 for skin softening, but I lowered that down to 38%; even still it might have taken away more detail than I intended. I also used the soft glow layer on her face (18%). Now here is where I have to laugh. I had softened to death the background, but I needed to use a texture. So I added Kim Klassen's Canvas Magic~screen layer per her tip. LOVE it! But her face...well, not so pretty, so I circled her again, but this time used a Gaussian blur on the part in the circle to remove the texture from the texture but keep the color. Seems kind of silly that I used so many different softening methods to make a picture with textures.

Anyway, the important thing to note is this is Canvas Magic on 100% screen mode~awesome! Now I am tempted to edit even more of my old pictures; I may not have time to take new ones!

Wow, what a great job you've done with the editing on this (already adorable) picture. You've really lightened up her face, so there is less contrast with the background. All attention is on her, where it belongs!

CedarSunflower is precious and you did a fabulous job of editing her portrait. Did you know that you can make a layer mask beside the chosen mode, like "Soft light", "screen", etc. and then use a soft black brush and just go over the parts you don't want the texture. Then adjust the opacity. Easy peasy!

What is this blog?

I am strictly an amateur photographer with 3 kids and a brand new D-SLR. I am finding that the best way for me to improve my photography is to participate in photo and photo editing challenges. But I don't want to saturate my real life blog with my photo attempts, so I started this blog for a place to post photos (blogger makes it sooo easy!). If you are interested in learning more about me and my adorable children, feel free to visit my real life blog.